Hello NASM users and developers!
I'm pleased to announce the release of QDot 8086, a mid-level programming language targeting the original IBM-PC architecture written as a set of macros for NASM — the Netwide Assembler. The idea behind it is to make it easy to write small, fast, correct and maintainable code in a language almost as expressive as C but without giving up all control Assembly language grants to programmers. It features support to functions of an arbitrary number of parameters and multiple return values, global and function-local variables, loop and conditional flow-control constructs, evaluation of arbitrarily complex stack-based expressions, symbol importing and primitive debugging. In order to accomplish this, NASM’s powerful preprocessing and assembling capabilities are used to achieve a machinery that very closely resembles a compiler. QDot has also a companion standard library that is fully BIOS-based, thus OS-independent, which provides array processing, keyboard, video, disk and speaker I/O, timing, low-level debugging, math functions, user interface procedures and last but not least a versatile metamorphic boot-loader, that makes it simple to build a binary that is simultaneously a valid DOS executable and a bootable image — a property known as run-within-OS-or-bootstrap-itself-without-OS. There are already a couple of programs implemented in QDot as a proof of concept: Terminal Matrix 8086 and DeciMatrix 8086. QDot currently supports only the tiny memory model (.COM binaries — whose code, data and stack fit all within 64kb segment boundaries).
QDot 8086:
http://oitofelix.github.io/qdot-8086/Terminal Matrix 8086:
http://oitofelix.github.io/terminal-matrix-8086/DeciMatrix 8086:
http://oitofelix.github.io/decimatrix-8086/
